Volume 8 Issue 4

Comment

If scientific advice is to have any value, it must come from sources that are not under any obligation to any organisation, public or private. Most principal scientific organisations in Western countries have similar ideas about the importance of independence but the independence of American science is being eroded.

A resource consisting of one million porcine ESTs is described, providing an essential resource for annotation, comparative genomics, assembly of the pig genome sequence, and further porcine transcription studies.

Genetic characterisation of 15 French Canadian patients from different regions of the province of Quebec who were clinically diagnosed as USH1 reveals that carriers of the c.216G>A-allele haplotype belong to the early founders of both the Acadian and the Quebec population.

The integration of stress-dependent, tissue- and cell-specific expression profiles and 5'-regulatory sequence motif analysis defines a common stress transcriptome, identifies major motifs for stress response, and places stress response in the context of tissue and cell lineages in the Arabidopsis root.

Comparison of the expression profiles of S. cerevisiae duplicate pairs with that of their pre-duplication orthologs in C. albicans identified a class of genes that may present cases of regulatory neofunctionalization.

A study of yeast protein complexes, complexes of known three-dimensional structure in the Protein Data Bank and clusters of pair-wise protein interactions in the networks of several organisms revealed that duplication of homomeric interactions often results in the formation of complexes of paralogous proteins.

For Assembly 20 of the Candida albicans genome, the sequence of each of the eight chromosomes was determined, revealing new insights into gene family creation and dispersion, subtelomere organization, and chromosome evolution.

Fish-mammal genomic alignments were used to compare over 800 conserved non-coding elements that associate with genes that have undergone fish-specific duplication and retention, revealing a pattern of element retention and loss between paralogs indicative of subfunctionalization.

The effects of the adenovirus Ad5 on basic host cell programs, such as cell-cycle regulation, were studied in a microarray analysis of human fibroblasts. About 2,000 genes were up- or down-regulated after Ad5 infection and Ad5 infection was shown to induce reversal of the quiescence program and recapitulation of the core serum response.

Analysis of genomic resources available for cnidarians revealed that several key components of the vertebrate innate immune repertoire are present in representatives of the basal cnidarian class Anthozoa, but are missing in Hydra, a member of the class Hydrozoa, indicating ancient origins for many components of the innate immune system.

The categorisation and structural analysis of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPRs) sequences from 195 microbial genomes show that repeats from diverse organisms can be grouped based on sequence similarity, and that some groups have pronounced secondary structures with compensatory base changes.

Comparison of the gene-expression profiles of planarians in which all adult pluripotent stem cells (neoblasts) were eliminated and wild-type worms identified a putative neoblast-restricted gene set. This included many genes involved in chromatin modeling and RNA metabolism, suggesting that epigenetic modifications and post-transcriptional regulation are important for neoblast regulation.

Comprehensive exon microarrays with a simple intra-gene normalization algorithm were used to detect human tissue-specific alternative splicing events, suggesting significant expression outside of known exons and well annotated genes and a high frequency of alternative splicing events.

Using a genomic microarray, gene expression at three different developmental stages of the schistosome parasite were analyzed, resulting in the identification of 1154 developmentally enriched transcripts.

Analysis of the gene expression profiles of wing imaginal discs from ash2 and ash1 mutants shows that they are highly similar, supporting a model in which they act together to maintain stable states of transcription.

The meiotic map of the honey bee is presented, including the main features that emerged from comparisons with the sequence-based physical map. The map is based on 2,008 markers and is about 40 M long, corresponding to a recombination rate of 22 cM/Mb.